Guides · The story

The riven land

Riventale means "the riven land": the tale of what was torn. The game never tells its story outright. It comes in pieces: the opening scene of every new world, the titles the bosses carry, the ruins themselves, and sixteen Torn Pages scattered through the world. This page sets out what anyone can see from the road. The rest is in the pages.

Torn Page I, Whoever Finds This, open on parchment: “I woke where you woke, in the quiet middle of the land, with nothing but my hands.”

The Crystal

Every Torn Page agrees on one thing: the world was whole once. Over the middle lands hung a Crystal that held the four elements, Water, Fire, Earth and Wind, with a white light at its core. The Riventale crest still shows it: four colours round a white heart. The Crystal is gone now. Its shards are not.

The middle lands, where you wake, are calm. Every edge of the world is wild. Why the middle stayed quiet when everything else broke is one of the questions the pages keep circling.

The Firstfolk

In the east lived the Firstfolk, a people of makers. Their workshops turned out minds of tungsten that walked and worked and never tired, Wanestones that carried a traveller from one end of the land to the other, and lenses ground so fine they saw through stone. In Page III one of them writes: "There is nothing in this world we cannot understand, given time." Their country still lies in the east, broken: the Firstfolk Wastes, a grey land of scrap and rust under a sky that never clears.

You can still hold their work in your hands. The Wrights, their workers, wander the Wastes without masters, and tungsten, their makers' metal, still calms them. Farglasses still carry you across the land. Brass Wardens still guard the Lens Foundries where the great lenses were ground, and Reliquaries still keep what someone thought worth keeping. None of them can tell you where the Firstfolk went.

The Riving

It happened in a single night. A Firstfolk child remembers the sky going white "like the inside of a bell", and four colours tearing apart in the air. The elements fled into lands folded away where no map reaches. The east burned, and the Firstfolk were gone. That night is called the Riving, and the land has not been whole since.

Who lit the fire, and why, is written down. You will have to find the pages that say so.

The binders and the Keepers

Someone chained the elements, one in each of four temples, with four crystal towers to hold every chain. The chained elements became the Keepers. A chain-binder wrote: "It is not mercy and it is not punishment. It is a door held shut." The towers still feed the chains, and the chains pull a fallen Keeper back: while they stand, it rises again in its temple.

How each one fights is in the Keepers guide. Where the temples are, and how to reach them, is for you to find.

The Shardborn

The Crystal broke, and its shards did not lie still. Four of them pulled their element's land into a body: the Shardborn, giants 48 blocks tall, sung to sleep in sunken stone cradles. Bring one down and its Shard is free. "Every shard remains," the opening says. What the shards are for, it does not say. Their fights: the Shardborn guide.

The Titan

One engine of the Firstfolk still stands. The Titan, the Last Engine of the Firstfolk, guards their altars in the Wastes and does not know its makers are gone. Its body is obitite, ore that went black in the Riving and never warmed again: "the metal of the dead".

Rivet

Rivet is a small Firstfolk scout with one bright lens for an eye, the last Firstfolk machine still awake. He speaks the last line of the opening scene and, if you ask for help with I'm new, shows you the basics. He talks in short, dry sentences and knows more than he says. Why he alone was left switched on is in Page IX.

You, the Wanderer

You wake in the calm middle lands with nothing but your hands, and the first chest you open holds a page from someone who woke there before you. From there the road runs from Wanderer to Adventurer to Champion: through the Wastes, into the hidden lands, and on to whatever still burns at the end of it.

The questions

Why did the Crystal break, and who answers for it?
Who were the binders, and why chains instead of freedom?
Why is the middle of the land calm, when every edge is wild?
What flies over the burning east at night?
Who woke where you woke, and what became of them?
Can a Crystal broken be made whole?

The Torn Pages answer some of these. The game answers the rest in its own time.

The sixteen Torn Pages

The pages are written in four voices: an unknown wanderer who woke where you woke, a Firstfolk child, the Artificer, and a temple chain-binder. Each part of the world holds its own part of the story:

Pages	Found in	What they cover
I to V	Chests in cabins, desert temples, igloos and dungeons in the middle lands	The calm world, the Crystal, the Firstfolk, rumours of the east
VI to X	Ruins and fallen giants in the Firstfolk Wastes	The Firstfolk's great work, the night before, the Riving, the Titan
XI to XV	The chests in the four Keeper temples	The binding, and how each Keeper came to be
XVI	Left by the Elemental Core when it falls	The last page

A chest offers the lowest-numbered page of its place that you have not found yet, so the story arrives roughly in order, and the first chest you open in the middle lands always holds Page I. Pages count for each player separately.

Reading and keeping them

Right click a page (tap it on a touch screen) to read it on parchment.
The Journal (J, or the pause menu) keeps every page you have found in its Torn Pages tab, beside a list of all twenty-four, so you can reread them after the item is gone.
Finding the first sixteen earns the achievement The Whole Tale, and the aura of the same name; all twenty-four earn The Tale Entire.
The Journal's Story tab replays the opening scene in single player.

What the pages do not say

They never give directions. The way into the hidden lands is not written down anywhere in the game, though Page V describes a child holding a lens up to the light and seeing "something behind the world, folded small and full of colour". The opening scene ends on a promise from the one who tells it: "What I broke can be made whole." How, the pages leave to you.

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Next: Questions. All sections: the guides.